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Listen to Summer Brenner read from Dust at KALW/New Arrivals

From BERKELEYSIDE (Joanne Furio)

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Visit Poets Reading the News for "Blue Innocents," a poem dedicated to Gaza

From DUSIE: Tuesday poem #568 : Summer Brenner : A BIRD SEES

From FICTION ATTIC

The Missing Lover, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2022
Updated edition with color illustrations by Lewis Warsh
ISBN: 978-1-959556-00-8 Available online

"Multum in Parvo" in Hello Goodbye Apocalypse, editors, Owen Hill & Carol Jameson, 2021 

"Identity Theft" in Berkeley Noir, editors Jerry Thompson and Owen Hill, Akashic Books, 2020

Richmond Tales, Lost Secrets of the Iron Triangle; Oakland Tales, Lost Secrets of The Town; Ivy, Homeless in San Francisco are available online.

From CUKE, read "On the Way to Tassajara" (pdf)

WITHIN ... WITHOUT (in English and Arabic)

When she wakes, she can see the color of the day. Clouds..The rising moon..Stars. Through the window is the future.

On her side of the glass is the past. A room filled with books she once read. Odors of cardamom and kebab she cooked yesterday. Photos of loved ones,alive and dead..

Maybe it's obvious from the curtain. A woman lives in this room..It's not made to be a curtain but a simple piece of beautiful cloth..Perhaps found in the market. Or given to her as a gift from an aunt or grandmother.

Sometimes she uses the curtain rod as a clothesline where she hangs stockings or a blouse to dry against the glass..

The curtain covers the window's lower half so she can hide from the outside. But the upper half is open to the sky that reveals what is beyond the Earth. Beyond war. Beyond even herself.

We don't know her name. So much of the history of women has been nameless..

She appears as "Jassim al-Assadi's wife (name unknown)" on the List of Iraqi academics assassinated in Iraq during the US-led occupation..

On the list of 324, she is #71..

All we know is she was Jassim al-Assadi's wife, a Lecturer at the College of Administration and Economy at Baghdad University. The date of death associated with #71 is October 2, 2006. Mohammed Jassim al-Assadi, Professor and Dean of the College of Administration and Economy at Baghdad University appears in the list as #70, killed in a targeted attack with a son.

Days, months, years, over a decade has passed, but the living remember. Perhaps family and friends think of her on her birthday and the anniversary of her death. Maybe one of them has her scarf or a vase. Maybe another the photos of her son as a baby. Her name is passed among them. A name we don't know..

Yet we too remember her.


Title of print:: Within ... Without

Name: Summer Brenner, USA

Print technique: Digital chromogenic

Text and photo exhibited with "Shadow and Light," Arab Art Festival, Liverpool, 2019